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Will Kain Colter's labor fight at Northwestern lead to, oh, the 'International Brotherhood of Linebackers'?

Kain Colter,

Northwestern quarterback Kain Colter, who is seeking unionization for college athletes, can not only advance the football on the field, but he hopes to advance the rights of the players off of it. (AP Photo/Stephen Morton)
(Stephen Morton)

Syracuse, N.Y. — Somewhere, Samuel Gompers smiles upon Kain Colter, the Northwestern University quarterback, and those Wildcats who have followed him down that stony path toward unionization for college athletes.

Well, yeah. But Gompers also sought more money and shorter hours for his legions. And that, ultimately, is what Kolter and his believers will get around to pursuing, too.

Right now, the issues on Kolter's table deal mostly with medical protections for the athletes and adjustments to their scholarships. But sooner or later (and you might want to bet the former), the matter of compensation will be introduced. And that's when Colter and all the rest will even more robustly channel Norma Rae.

The response by the NCAA, which believes that if God hadn't intended for the athletes to get sheared he wouldn't have made them sheep, has been as predictable as that raise in Nick Saban's (or Fill-In-The-Blank's) salary: The young men and women out there in the costumes — the ones who star in the TV programming that is college sports, the ones who generate all those millions of dollars for the administrators who manipulate them and for the coaches who boss them — are, ahem, student/athletes.

Employees? No, insists the NCAA, which has actually deemed the label, in the matter of athletics, a threat to academia in a way that, say, spring football apparently is not. Those outside linebackers and power forwards and such are not employees, which means that all this talk of labor unions, of international brotherhoods and sisterhoods, should be forthwith rendered moot, null, void . . . and any other words that suggest, "Let's change the subject."

And you know something? The NCAA is right. The athletes aren't employees. They are, instead, indentured servants whose schedules in and out of season indicate that they are allowed to pursue the mission of a college — that is, acquiring an education — only when it does not conflict with the grander goals of winning the next game and selling the next ticket and goosing the next television contract.

So, rights (i.e., more money and shorter hours for the athletes) do not make for a topic of discussion among those Lannisters who sit on the Iron Throne. At least not now. At least not in this current NCAA world in which the puppeteers get paid, but the puppets don't.

Things, though, will change . . . eventually. Consciences will kick in . . . somewhere down the road. Fairness will triumph . . . in the long run. And when it does, Kain Colter — who'll be older and grayer and heavier in the jowls by then — may end up looking like Samuel Gompers.

After all, the college athletes of tomorrow will almost certainly be enjoying what Colter began to seek for them in 2014: More opportunities to cultivate their better natures.